Can You Design a Better Starbucks Cup?

The company is offering $10 million to develop a more sustainable container.

Starbucks wants to make the world a little greener—and they're willing to spend some green to do it. The coffee giant has joined forces with Closed Loop Partners, a group that invests in sustainable goods and recycling technology to create the NextGen Cup Challenge, in hopes of developing a more earth-friendly coffee cup.

With the challenge, the company is offering $10 million in grants to innovative entrepreneurs "working on ideas that could lead to the development of more sustainable cup solutions." The cups Starbucks currently uses are made with 10 percent post-consumer recycled fiber, making them partially recyclable, depending on where you live. The goal now is to make them fully recyclable and compostable; today's cup could be tomorrow's napkin, and so on.

This isn't Starbucks' first foray into sustainability. Just last summer, they unveiled a new "sippy" lid for their Nitro Cold Brew as a way of eliminating the need for straws.

And the company isn't leaving the project entirely to the populace; their internal R&D team will continue in pursuit of this ultimate goal. That group is currently testing out a new bio-liner made from plant-based materials—the 13th internal test of a new sustainable cup concept in the past year alone.